We have just virtualized most (going to be all soon) of our servers onto two ESXi hosts that are both internal. We host about 15 servers in house and are currently backing everything onto tape with no real solid DR or Backup solution. We currently have:

We currently back up most server content to FreeNas as a local backup and then backup some of the other data to an LT05 tape and a DATA160 tape, which isnt going to hold everything that we need, so we are being selective (terrible, I know). Most of this poor configuration was a hack up job due to limited cash flow and an extinct IT department.

We have since gotten the approval for new hardware and storage costs, and are currently exploring ideas to complete (or actually obtain) a successful DR and Backup plan.

We are looking into replicating our data off-site (we are in NJ, so somewhere off this coast), into a backup / recovery software (such as VM Protect, Appasure [Dell], VEEAM, etc), and looking for a way to complete daily backups using a combination of our local NAS (freenas in this case) and our 2 tape drives.

Thanks in advance for reading / helping us out! It is greatly appreciated.

Any suggestions on how we should configure this or any useful readings anyone can link me to (perhaps ones I havnt found yet)

Is there a way I can set up a demo of your product to get a good understanding of how it works?

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I am more inclined to just set our FreeNAS as our primary target and have it replicate at another location for DR purposes.

We could always use tapes for a local backup just in case and to have some extra retention, and perhaps a speedier recovery if the internal NAS has an issue.

We have a 20mb connection to our location, I would have to do the math for pulling a backup to see how long it would take, but I know we can always go with a software that supports "Instant VM recovery by running VM from backup image" which is nice, cause then it enables us to not force the need for a faster connection.

Any other suggestions on which direction you guys would go if you were in our shoes?

For online server backup with instant disaster recovery, and no appliance to buy you may want to also consider Zetta.

Zetta moves your data across the internet using WebDAV, which makes it so fast we don't have to ask you to buy an appliance.

Pulling a full backup of ~8TB on a 20mb connection would take about 40 days. You can easily throttle that during the day as needed. Since probably only 1-2% of that data changes daily, the nightly incremental backups are easy.

Since we are appliance based, we support tape as an archive option, but not as the initial target for the backups.

For your second question - are you looking for a DR site, a storage facility, or a colocation? Keep in mind that however long it takes to get a backup to a storage facility (40 days for 8TB as Nick mentioned above) will be the same amount of time that it will take to download that same data.

Would definitely recommend StoreGrid (a disk to disk backup and DR solution) which works great to provide total protection for virtual as well as physical environment.

Ideally we would recommend taking a backup onsite locally and replicate offsite for redundant storage. StoreGrid provides instant recoverablity options like restoring servers within minutes, granular restores of specific file/folders, everything from a single console which can be centrally managed.

We would be glad to help you in further clarifications regarding StoreGrid.

Keep in mind that however long it takes to get a backup to a storage facility (40 days for 8TB as Nick mentioned above) will be the same amount of time that it will take to download that same data.

That is assuming the connection is synchronous, not burstable and is the only connection available in the office for downloading data.

Additionally, when you recover from tape do you close your eyes and pick a tape at random to begin your recover from? Most likely you chose the tape that has the critical data on it first and recover the least important data last, the same holds true for recovery from the cloud.

That is assuming the connection is synchronous, not burstable and is the only connection available in the office for downloading data.

Additionally, when you recover from tape do you close your eyes and pick a tape at random to begin your recover from? Most likely you chose the tape that has the critical data on it first and recover the least important data last, the same holds true for recovery from the cloud.

This is very true, but an aspect of the recovery that people sometimes overlook.

There are several other questions you should answer before evaluating vendors because the answers will make a huge difference in strategy and cost. One of the most important is what are your company uptime requirements? For example if the server room burned, what is an acceptable downtime? 1 hr, 24 hours, a week, etc?

Another question is dependent on the first.... are you looking to backup the entire virtual machine's VMDK files, or only the critical data files inside each server (e.g. the traditional approach)?

You are using tape, so you may have some sort of archiving requirements?

Looks like you have just over 2 TB of data, but I suspect less than 1 TB is actual user data or databases. Plus after compression, you could be looking at less than 500G of storage which could easily be backed offsite nightly and for only a few hundred dollars per month ....with no tapes or appliances needed.

With an ESXi environment and something like Veeam, you can backup to your NAS and replicate. The initial replication might need to be seeded, but after that, only change blocks are backed up. This is a big win in terms of bandwidth savings. And a big win in not having human fallibility involved in a repeat process to get your data off-site.

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